These models appear as a USB mass storage device to the operating system so that the device can be accessed like any other removable disk, a floppy disk for example. Older MuVo devices and all Jukebox models use a custom protocol named PDE (Portable Digital Entertainment, a Creative internal device designation) that requires the installation of drivers before the device can be recognised by the operating system.

Creative's foray into the MP3 player market began with the Creative NOMAD, a rebranded Samsung ElectronicsYepp YP-D40 player with 64 megabytes of solid-state memory.

The NOMAD Jukeboxes have varied in their use of connections. The Jukebox 3 and Jukebox Zen were unusual in their use of the older USB 1.1 standard despite their predecessor, the NOMAD Jukebox 2, having used the newer USB 2.0 standard. Part of the reason for this was the inclusion of a FireWire connection, which is of comparable speed to USB 2.0.

A variant of the NOMAD Jukebox was also sold as an OEM product by Dell under the name Dell Digital Jukebox (Dell DJ), a USB 2.0 device. The Second Generation Dell DJ and Dell Pocket DJ 5 are also OEM products from Creative.

Future versions in the Creative ZEN line exclusively use Microsoft's Media Transfer Protocol (also known as PlaysForSure), and some legacy devices have been supplied with firmware upgrades to support MTP. The first NOMAD player and the first NOMAD Jukebox use proprietary protocols, neither PDE or MTP.

Besides the NOMAD Explorer or MediaSource programs included with the devices, there are other programs which can be used to manage the player and to transfer data.

Bundled software

Creative NOMAD Explorer - Software included with older NOMAD models and used to transfer music and data to the device. This has since been replaced by Creative MediaSource

Creative MediaSource - A fully featured audio player for Microsoft Windows that also manages NOMAD devices and can be used to transfer media to the device or to synchronise playlists with the device - a feature that was unavailable in the previous NOMAD Explorer software.